


My Tongue is Dull and My Heart is Duller

by Lee_Queen



Category: Sword Art Online (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Aincrad, But some fluff too, Disability, Exploring Relationships, F/F, F/M, Family, Insecurity, No Lesbians Die, Psychological Trauma, Reincarnation, Sad boi hours, Stuttering, Trauma, Verbal Disability, a lot of it, angst boi hours, focuses on time of aincrad arc, gonna be lots of tears, i really want to include ordinal scale later, irl centric, maybe fairy dance idk, soft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25745374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lee_Queen/pseuds/Lee_Queen
Summary: Suguha turns off the radio station playing in her room, and suddenly, Sakura's giggles echo into the wooden floors and paper walls. The older girl still dances without the music, twirling in dizzying circles as her melodic laughter escapes her. Suguha can't help but grin at the sight. Gliding forward in her old slippers, she takes Sakura's hands and gives her a smile more brilliant than the full, luminous moon."See," she begins, "you don't need to talk to tell me anything. I may not be as quiet as my brother-"Suddenly, Suguha's grip on Sakura's wrists feels more like cuffs than comfort, and her smile freezes; stiff."-but you can still be silent as you like. I know he isn't with us right now, but, but-"Sakura relaxes as she gets the message Suguha tries to convey to her, and a small grin replaces her awful facade."And I... I thou-ght that I h-had the stut-ter."*Or, in which a girl is reborn with knowledge of a past life she definitely shouldn't have, befriends Kazuto Kirigaya pre-SAO, yet still allows him to play the game.Cross-posted on fanfiction.net under Cyan Serenade.
Relationships: Kirigaya Kazuto | Kirito & Kirigaya Suguha | Leafa, Kirigaya Kazuto | Kirito & Original Female Character(s), Kirigaya Kazuto | Kirito/Yuuki Asuna | Asuna, Kirigaya Suguha | Leafa/Original Character(s), Kirigaya Suguha | Leafa/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 9





	My Tongue is Dull and My Heart is Duller

**Author's Note:**

> I have a vague idea of what I want with this and very little planning. Congrats.

Sakura did not mean to become the only friend of the emo gamer she knows will go through hell in virtual reality, all because she remembers things she definitely shouldn’t. 

Japanese is hard, always has been for her, especially because she remembers a separate life in a similar time to this one where she was American, and spoke only English and the bare bones of Spanish. Because of that, her brain tends to automatically throw English grammar rules at her, hell, even English words, even though the only language she has actually learned here, in Japan, with her Japanese family, is Japanese. It leads her to having a stutter, something the fourteen year-old tries to not be ashamed of, and trying to speak as little as possible.

The best way to do that, she found out, is not to find someone who enjoys talking, who needs the silence to be filled, but someone else who also does not like talking. She finds her silent partner in a certain Kazuto Kirigaya, who she meets on her first day of secondary school. Their desks are right beside each other, as fate had it dictated through their seating chart, and aside from being a deathly pale for a twelve year-old, he doesn’t stand out much from the rest of her classmates. 

They spend most of their time in silence, and don’t even talk until a month into the school year, at lunch on the day after she missed class to go to speech therapy.

“Where’d you go yesterday?” he mumbles quietly, and at first she doesn’t realize that he’s talking to her. That is, until he pokes her arm, and her attention is drawn from the collapsing onigiri in her hand to him. Her dark eyes narrow at him in confusion as she tilts her head sideways, questioning him without words. Surprisingly, he actually understands her unasked question and repeats himself.

“Ah,” she says, and thinks of the shortest way to answer. Single word answers work best. If she’s lucky, single syllable. “Doctor.”

He nods, and doesn’t say anything else until lunch is almost over.

“My name is Kirigaya Kazuto.”

An anime that she remembers as being poorly written and yet one of her early favorites flashes through her head at the name. Sword Art Online. She grimaces, both out of the realization of shit, this poor kid and shit, I have to respond. It doesn’t disappear from her face when she introduces herself. She enunciates it slowly and hopes he doesn’t think she’s stupid.

“Mi-na-mi Sakura.”

Somehow, from then on, she finds herself a new best friend that doesn’t mind if she doesn’t talk.

It’s been two years since then, and now she sits quietly on his bed, legs crossed, muted grey skirt slipping up her thighs as she fiddles with her dark tights. Her long bangs curtain off parts of her vision, the inky hair phasing in and out of her sight as she shifts uncomfortably. Laying beside her, dressed like he’s trying to be a subtle fanboy of MCR in his obsidian outfit with the NerveGear helmet surrounding his head, his limp body indents what used to be a perfectly made bed. It’s been twenty minutes since he willingly put on his electric death trap, but he doesn’t know his mind is in a graveyard. Not yet.

Sakura thinks she should have tried harder to convince him to not play the game. To let her try it first, even if he ended up accidentally killing her by taking it off of her head. But at the same time, she doesn’t know what interfering would’ve done to everyone else trapped in the game. In the end, Kazuto is the reason six thousand people live. Would it be fair of her to trade his life for so many others? Really, she wonders, how selfish is she?

She let a fourteen year-old walk into trauma. And she didn’t even try that hard to stop him. Truly, she’s awful.

As she hears the sound of a car pulling up outside the house, her tan fingers shift to Kazuto’s hand. It’s probably his aunt, coming back from the market. 

His skin is pale like ice, but still warm in her tight grip. It’s a little wet, probably from her sweat, before she belatedly sees a tear drop onto his fingertip, and realizes she’s crying.

When she hears the front door of the house swing open, she can’t help but whisper her desperation to the boy who won’t hear her.

“I… I’m sor-ry… Ka-zu-to.”


End file.
